Australia’s Commonwealth Bank says records of nearly 20 million accounts lost
SYDNEY: Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), the country’s top lender, confirmed yesterday it lost records of almost 20 million accounts and decided to not inform its clients, a breach the nation’s prime minister called ‘an extraordinary blunder’.
CBA’s announcement, which was made in a YouTube video by a senior bank executive a day after BuzzFeed Australia reported the data breach, puts further pressure on Australian banks already reeling from revelations of widespread misconduct in a judicial inquiry.
It is also the latest blow to CBA, which has been accused in a federal lawsuit of breaching anti-money laundering protocols more than 50,000 times and has admitted to using outdated medical definitions to refuse sick customers health insurance payouts.
Earlier this week, a regulator ordered CBA to keep an extra A$ 1 billion ( US$ 750 million) in cash reserves as punishment for the al le ged money laundering breaches, which it is contesting.
In a YouTube video, CBA’s acting head of retail banking services, Angus Sullivan, said the bank found in May 2016 it had lost two magnetic tapes containing 15 years of data on customer names, addresses and account numbers for 19.8 million accounts.
The tapes were due to be disposed of, but CBA could not confirm they were securely destroyed, Sullivan said.
The tapes did not contain PINs, passwords or other data that could enable account fraud, he said.
The bank informed its regulators and launched an internal investigation which found the tapes had “most likely been disposed of”, Sullivan said. It did not tell customers because “we balanced the need to alert customers without unnecessarily alarming them”, he said.
“This is an extraordinary blunder,” Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told reporters.
“It’s hard to imagine how so much data could be lost in this way. If that had happened today, the bank would have to advise each of their customers,” Turnbull added. — Reuters